The Chalk Circle [1]
Trs. by Xiaoyuan
In the chalk circle stands son of
man
Made from fluid of earth semen
of heaven
In solitude he grows a little
bigger
Helpless to choose
Outside the chalk circle stand
two women
Of unknown flesh and blood or
rather
Spotless and unstained
They’ve just gone through a war
or rather
Been possessed by war
The chalk circle is grey and red
As are the eyes fighting
Eyes are red and grimy
As the one being fought
The judge’s bench a gavel
hammers
Endless rivers and mountains
on one side
Bonds of blood and marriage
on the other
Rivers and mountains suck the
bond dry
The bond consolidates rivers
and mountains
And me? What am I?
I am the prey a stack of
substances
A soul without recognition
But waiting
To be possessed by or belong
to
Could I say I was just passing
through
By accident I fell into this
chalk circle
I don’t belong to war
Nor to peace
The territory of the chalk
circle is my only home
The judge’s bench a gavel
hammers
Who will have me?
The small chalk circle’s
crammed with firewood
Where my nascent
consciousness
Broils in flames of law
My blood writhes in the fight
Two hands reach from left and
right
One is maternal love so is the
other
One is rose so is the other
A waterfall issues from one
so from the other
They both frighten me
This chalk circle fight
Is as absurd within as without
The judge’s bench a gavel
hammers
Who will have me?
Whoever wins theirs is both
maternal love
The soldering iron welds
me inside
For a lifetime in the chalk
circle
For a lifetime
—Excerpt from Zhai Yongming,
The Cafe Review, Fall,
(USA: XPress), 2021, p. (6, 7).
Special guest editor of this
edition of Chinese poetry:
Sophia Kidd.
Dai Guangyu, Lost (detail)
Performance Art,
Denmark, 2007.
Image provided by the artist.
Three Witches
Trs. by Sophia Kidd
The stakes stand but the
witches have fled
Night is complete a cold
lonely grave
The moon has also run off
under dark cloud cover
Voices twitter
Tossed and scattered silver
light
Concise dialogue a cat’s cry
One dry voice
As if about to be lit by match
Telling yesterday’s story
Of murder and ruin
Voice spasms larynx rasps
He desperately scrapes out
words
To tell us of a general
and his whore
How they were together
There’s another sound neither
male nor female
A thin and old tone as if a
mumble
Blackbeard rubs his hands
making bits of predictions
Everything is of old everything
Will come around again
Prophecy entwined in
Blackbeard’s night
Passed down for ages like
today
The witch’s stake has become
a dragon chair at the center
the world
An earth-shaking conspiracy
covers the world
Flames are everywhere
lynchings and viruses
spread
East west north and south
Invisible chaos so loud we
don’t hear
This is an age that cannot be
predicted
Although the witch has not
gone far the script and
stage
Have grown dull and boring
The plot and performance
belong to the audience
The ending will open forth or
come to an abrupt end
Until i’m immersed i go down
with doomsday
The world is see-through
though light is faint
Witches never go far
Their throats still itchy
Swallowing all kinds of ominous
Because death never leaves us
Because the road ahead
cannot be predicted
—Excerpt from Zhai Yongming,
The Cafe Review, Fall,
(USA: XPress), 2021, p. (8, 9).
Special guest editor of this
edition of Chinese poetry:
Sophia Kidd.
Su Zhengxun,
The World of Three Cun,
Ink-wash on Paper, 70 cm x 70 cm,
2021. Image provided
by the artist and Xi Yongjun.
Looking for Vivian [2]
Trs. by Sophia Kidd
Looking for Vivian
Looking for a story covered up
Looking for a life even Google
couldn’t provide
Looking for a pile of
undeveloped negatives
Looking for the visage behind
the picture
Looking for Vivian
Looking for that changing
address
Looking for a shadow without
a trace
She hides between children
Looking for the children’s
nanny
Looking for the nanny’s
homeland
Looking for Vivian
Looking for two arms
suspended in mid-air
Holding an old camera
Holding a hundred and fifty
thousand frames
Looking for the face behind
the glass
Looking for that inner
life never to be returned
Looking for Vivian
Looking for a hundred and fifty
thousand ownerless
negatives
Looking for twenty boxes
Looking for the drifter in those
boxes
Looking for Vivian
Looking for a lonely stubborn
soul
That boils within a stubborn
body
Anonymous in hiding but
overflowing with scorching
light
Looking for mannequins with
broken limbs
Looking for the passionate eye
gleaming for plastic skin
Looking for Vivian
Looking for a moth at the flame
That throws itself onto an
expanse of streets and
people
That smashes against the
kitchen mirror
Looking for the sorrow in the
mirror
Looking for the excrement of
streets and leftovers
Stuff them in a black box
Why? When the suitcase
came out
Floating over New York
smoking
When those negatives
circulated in the hands of
strangers
When the dust of time was
auctioned off cheaply
When countless faces emerged
from the red liquid
Hanging in rows of social
platforms
Why? Aside from a name
Had she ever come to our
world?
Looking for Vivian
It’s not about answers
Why? She didn’t share
answers with the world
Aside from her identity
secrets and nationality
Mere identification
destruction of genius
An art system that insulates
society
What else is there?
One hundred and fifty
thousand times why
Or just once for nothing
With the tributes of twenty
suitcases
Buried along with her in no
woman’s land
—Excerpt from Zhai Yongming,
The Cafe Review, Fall,
(USA: XPress), 2021, p. (10, 11).
Special guest editor of this
edition of Chinese poetry:
Sophia Kidd.
To read more poems, please check out
[1] Story of the Chalk Circle: Two women are fighting for the same child. To decide who the real mother is, the judge places the child at the center of a chalk circle and asks the women to pull the child out from the circle, which is a scene similar to the Judgement of Solomon. The mother, who cannot bear to hurt the child and gives in, wins the case. Contemporary drama often quotes, transforms or subverts classical drama. As the most adapted legend, Story of the Chalk Circle has been adapted into novels, Yuan Opera, and modern plays. In this poem, I referred to different adaptations and changed the point of view so as to focus on the shackles of maternal love upon children.
[2] Vivian Dorothy Maier (1926–2009) was only discovered for her photography posthumously. She spent her life as a nanny, spending her free time as a hobby photographer, taking more than 150,000 photographs, most of which went undeveloped. At first on Google, the only information about her photographs that could be found was her name. Later, her photographs were bought by a young collector, who investigated some details of her life and disseminated her photographs to a world-wide audience.
Zhai Yongming
Born in Chengdu, Sichuan, Zhai Yongming graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Zhai used to work in an institute of physics. Zhai’s major works of poetry collections include Women, What is Called All, Finally it Makes Me Fail, Fourteen Plain Songs, Line Spacing, Following Huang Gong Wang and Visiting Fuchun Mountains.
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